Month: August 2021

Chapter 25: Imagining Mystery

“There is something

that contains everything.

Before heaven and earth

It is.

Oh, it is still, unbodied,

all on its own, unchanging,

all pervading,

ever-moving.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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One of the great and grounding questions of philosophy—great precisely because it is among those most likely to naturally occur to a child—was first explicitly asked by Leibniz: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

The Daoist (and Buddhist) answer is as simple as it is off-putting: There isn’t.

Or rather, the problem lies not in the world, but in the mindset that generates the question. The line the mind draws between being and non-being, form and emptiness, something and nothing is a function of our thinking, not a feature of our world. The blatant contradictions the text throws at us—the Way here is said to be both still and ever-moving—are not propositions whose truth or falsity we are meant to assess, but monkey wrenches aimed at wrecking our monkey minds.

“Monkey mind” is a phrase you hear a lot in spirituality circles. It’s an intuitive metaphor everyone can connect with: most of the time a raucous band of thoughts are bouncing around our heads, causing a commotion and trying to disrupt our plans.

But there’s a deeper sense in which it’s apt. Let’s tweak Leibniz’s question: “Why is there something called thinking in the human mind rather than no thinking?” If it’s true that, as is the case for all sentient beings, the primary driver of our cognition was survival, then it means that our basic relation to the world is binary: fight or flight, live or die. What if this same black and white bio-logic were so powerful that it extended into the higher reaches of our cognition, such that “logic” and its basic rules, such as the law of non-contradiction, were rooted in our mortality? This would not mean that logic is arbitrary—only that its scope is limited, its truth conditional, its attempts to grasp the entire order of things in concepts folly.

But you must be careful. You might conclude from the above that we are just freaks of nature, evolutionary accidents, confused animals. You might conclude that there is no Dao, no Logos, no Natural Law, no sacred order of things. That is the position of what has been called the neo-Darwinian view of the world, a thoroughgoing materialistic dogma, any deviation from which is dismissed as “woo.”

In the 1980s, physicist, Manhattan Project member, and inventor of the terms “black hole” and “wormhole” John Wheeler saw things differently. According to his theory, laid out in the paper “Its from Bits,” “every item of the physical world has at bottom…an immamerial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-and-no questions….; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”

Our strange brains are not oddballs in an otherwise even universe. The universe, in this view, is fundamentally odd. Or rather, it is the odd oscillation between even and odd, yes and no, being and non-being, something and nothing. Mind monkeys through the cosmos as much as through our heads. The truly odd thing—and the true confusion—is that we have built our modern civilization on the assumption that existence is even.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 24: Proportion

“You can’t stand on tiptoe

or walk in leaps and bounds.

You can’t shine by showing off

or get ahead by pushing.

Self-satisfied people do no good,

self-promoters never grow up.

Such stuff is to the Tao

as garbage is to food

or a tumor to the body,

hateful.

The follower of the Way

avoids it.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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One of the funniest memes of the Trump era was a series of photos superimposing the back half of a horse on the asses of Trump and his brood. The lampooner spied a curious feature of the Trump family posture: they stand like centaurs. Look it up. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The mythological creature is both fitting and not.

Fitting, in that Trump’s flashy façade hid a monster. We think of the narcissist as someone who is supremely self-satisfied, but the truth is the opposite. They feel so worthless inside that they need constant validation from others to fill the black hole in their heart.

While Trump’s heart was a black hole so supermassive that it warped the fabric of political spacetime, he reflected the culture as much he directed it. As a colleague of mine recently quipped, “There was a Trump-shaped hole in the culture, and Trump walked right through it.” He did not need to “leap and bound.” He just needed to step onto that escalator and descend the stairway from heaven that we had built for him.

For Americans, showing off, pushing, and self-promotion are theoretical vices but practically practical necessities. From credentialing to virtue-signaling, from Botox to photo-shopping, from the Power of Positive Thinking to the Secret, American culture could be characterized as a “tragedy of the common”: a zero-sum competition over image, income, and influence. The categorical imperative is to hide your back side and project a seamless bust of perfection. The ethos of toxic positivity predictably generates its opposite. The garbage we create, the tumors we accrue (literal and psychological), are simply the cost of doing business. As with Garrett Hardin’s original tragedy of the commons, the sad irony is that each, in pursuing his perceived self-interest, ensures the ruin of all. (The scenario is apt: the overgrazed pastures filled with cattle to produce the hamburgers Americans that fuel obesity, healthcare costs, and climate change). The confused centaurs are worse than the cattle overgrazing the pasture, for they could have chosen differently. As Aristotle noted, “just as man when is perfected is the best of animals, so too separated from law and justice he is worst of all…. Without virtue he is most unholy and savage, and worst in regard to sex and eating.”

The collapse of any kind of ecological commons is both cause and effect of the collapse of any kind of semantic commons. We still cling to the image of a “public square” where something called “debate” about “issues” purportedly happens, but the state of our public life better resembles the cultural topography of the country we are presently withdrawing from: an aggregate of loosely bound and poorly governed tribes who can’t get along. But we do so not with the grip of strong hands but the futile clasp of blunt hooves.

But the centaur is not a good fit for Trump in a different respect. The most important centaur in Greek mythology is wise Chiron, the tutor of the young Achilles. The centaur is the integrated human being: the one who has tamed and harnessed the ancient energies of the beast within, whose body and mind are wedded in a symbiotic dance, who is attuned to nature within and nature without.

The less “centaured” you are, the more you will pretend to be, the more you will trample underfoot.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 23: Nothing and Not

“Nature doesn’t make long speeches.

A whirlwind doesn’t last all morning.

A cloudburst doesn’t last all day.

Who makes the wind and rain?

Heaven and earth do.

If heaven and earth don’t go on and on,

Certainly people don’t need to.

….

People who work with loss

Belong to what’s lost.

….

Give yourself to loss

And when you’re lost you’ll be at home.

To give no trust

is to get no trust.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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In a desperate, funny, probing essay, “Against Nature Writing,” Charles Foster confronts the gulf between word and world:

“All names fall short of the shining of things,” wrote Andrew Harvey.³ To talk about mountains—to talk even about a squirt of bird shit—is to parody and misrepresent them sacrilegiously. It is a process of re-creating them in our own image. We don’t hear the wind at the summit ridge; we hear our own voice. We don’t smell the moth wings and digestive juice in the bird shit; we smell our own deodorized armpit.

If we earn money by writing about the natural world (as I do), this is bad news. I’m a fraud.

…

What’s to be done?

It’s a scary question. The next few paragraphs will decide whether there’s an honest way to pay my mortgage.

Much more is at stake than our dear writer’s mortgage. What is at stake is whether we human beings and our logos—both our strange power of speech and reason and, less vauntedly, the logos we stick onto the 10,000 things—are in any sense at home in the world. What is at stake is the whole ball game.

Lao-Tzu does not say that nature doesn’t speak—just that it doesn’t drone on. It somehow both takes its time and gets right to the point. Nature is all pith and marrow, yet leisurely nurtures both. Like Gandalf, nature is never late. It arrives precisely when it means to. And like Gandalf, it speaks in spells.

But the magic it practices often appears to us as dark; so dark that we cease to deem it magic and call it plain cruelty. If there is a wizard behind the veil of maya, he must be a dark one. This is Job’s suspicion. The whirlwind that takes his family and fortune and health doesn’t last all morning. Nor does the whirlwind from which God speaks to him near the story’s end. At bottom, Job’s case is “This doesn’t make sense. I followed the rules. You’re kind of a fucked up wizard. WTF?”

But when Job relents, everything changes. When he rests his case, he gets everything back twofold. The temptation is to conclude that this means Job was right all along, but that would be mistaken. Job’s case is the human attempt to make sense of the world through rule and line, to justify existence, and our main tool to make our case is language. When Job relents, he confesses to and embraces the weakness of the logos. Not it’s futility, but its weakness. But precisely in this way, the author of the prose-poem of the Book of Job summons language’s great power. Foster points to poetry as the solution to his bind:

Poetry can show the way. By allowing words to stand for themselves, poetry can escape many of the charges I’ve leveled against language by using language against itself: by subverting language. If we let words do that, they never stand for long; they fizz and spark like Roman candles, and set on fire all the words around them until the display looks like nothing the poet could ever have devised.

The ancient words of the Orthodox liturgy, or the Om mani padme hum, or the Upanishads, have an incantatory power—a power of invoking that which they seek to invoke—because they have been repeatedly uttered. But they have been repeatedly uttered because millions have trusted them. To take etymology really seriously is to trust words.

When we return to the root of a word, a sleepy spell is broken. I love telling my students that the root of our word religion is related to the word for “ligament.” All of a sudden, the entire cluttered constellation of ideas and memories and factoids and prejudices evoked by that odd region of human experience is veiled by clouds, and they must look down at the binding in their own bodies to see it anew. When we return to the root of a word, we remember, with Emerson, that “every word was once a poem.” And beyond that, every child’s first word is a poem. Far from being the most high-brow and sophisticated literary form, poetry is, at bottom, the most natural language.

There is no orientation toward life regarded as more impractical than the poetic. Yet there is no orientation that gives us a better chance at not only bearing the burden of being and the loss it entails, but receiving the gift of grace. When loss leaches away what we have come to call home, what calls us back is our original relation to things.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 22: Growing Downward

“Be broken to be whole,

twist to be straight.

Be empty to be full.

Wear out to be renewed.

Have little and gain much.

Have much and get confused.

….

What they used to say in the old days,

‘Be broken to be whole,’

was that mistaken?

Truly, to be whole

Is to return.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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One of the reasons that John Kerry lost the 2004 election—and, perhaps, one of the reasons we are twenty years in Afghanistan and 20 years behind on climat change—is that he broke a cardinal rule of politics: thou shalt not flip flop. He infamously remarked that he was “before the war before I was against it.” Cue the predictably devastating attack ad of Kerry windsurfing to and fro, mixing indecision with out-of-touch New England Brahminism: “John Kerry: he blows with the wind.”

The same rule rules mainstream philosophy: thou shalt not contradict oneself.

In this chapter, Lao-Tzu appears to break this rule, explicitly refuting the first statement with the last. What is going on?

Before sorting that out, let us address the content. The text advances a piece of perennial wisdom. In Biblical language, it acknowledges that we are all “broken cisterns.” The Babel Project is the same as the ego project: brokenness and wholeness, earth and heaven, darkness and light, are opposites, and salvation is crossing from one to the other. Becoming whole is not an operation you perform or a goal you achieve, it is something given to you, a free grace you cannot make or manifest through your own physical and mental powers. It is something you cannot make sense of, for the gospel is that you are whole precisely as broken. You are not whole in isolation, but in relation and as related. Put another way, you are whole as a part of the cosmos, of the body of Christ, of the 9,999 other things.

To learn this, you must learn, as Richard Rohr puts it, to “fall upward.” The Fall in Genesis is commonly understood as a moral lapse and a kind of regression. But before the Fall, Adam and Eve do not know real relationship, either with each other, or with God. They are “whole” only in the sense that a fetus is attached to its mother; they live in the dream world of the amniotic fluid. The serpent, who will only come to confused with the Devil centuries later, is typically seem as a tempter and homewrecker, upsetting the placid natural order of creation.

But to run with the Devil for a moment. The term for the devil, diabolo, originally meant “to scatter.” What is God’s method of creation? Separation and division: light from darkness, the waters above from the waters below, carving out a space for the heavenly bodies and the birds and the beasts and the sea creatures, setting aside a holy day for rest. Indeed, the act of consecration, of making something holy, is precisely to separate it out and set it aside. And his command for humanity? To be fruitful and multiply, and spread out across the earth. As Ken Wilber puts it, we do not so much move out of Eden as up from it.

The Devil’s work, then, is the continuation of creation by other means. By separating humanity from God, man from woman, man from nature, man from man, and man from himself, he paradoxically, in the fullness of time, brings them closer to real relationship. He instigates the break necessary for true wholeness, like a doctor who must re-break a crooked grown bone. The Devil demands a more perfect union. As the serpent, he is the zag to the zig of creation, the trickster that twists the straight; or rather, he reveals to us how the straight is already twisted. Just as Adam and Eve are banished from the garden, we cast the serpent from the whole, and we exile our own brokenness.

But the twist in this chapter is the final line. Lao-Tzu seems to take back the nugget of perennial wisdom. What gives? I suspect his concern is not so much the truth of the adage, as our attachment to it. We are mistaken not in embracing suffering as an opportunity for transformation, but in mindlessly repeating slogans from the past to numb us to the suffering in the present. When we fall back on the “wisdom of the ancients,” we insidiously sidestep and emotionally bypass the reality facing us. Lao-Tzu agrees with George Carlin: “Language is by and large a tool for concealing the truth.” No amount of deep-sounding quotes on Instagram, or wise verses from the Daodejing, or magical word-spells can show me how to alchemize the broken into the whole. The only way is return—to silence, to solitude, to the present moment.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 21: The Empty Heart

“The greatest power is the gift

of following the Way alone.

How the Way does things

Is hard to grasp, elusive.

Elusive, yes, hard to grasp,

Yet there are thoughts in it.

Hard to grasp, yes, elusive,

Yet there are things in it.

Hard to make out, yes, and obscure,

Yet there is spirit in it,

Veritable spirit.

There is certainty in it.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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This week, I tested positive for COVID, and was informed that I had to spend 10 days in isolation. The dread specter haunting and hounding the world the year last finally found its way into my body. After some hang wringing and teeth gnashing, after entertaining numbing myself for a week with Netflix and other drugs, I surprised myself. I decided to treat my isolation time as a retreat, to turn my quarantine into a quest, to receive the diagnosis as a gift. For reasons I needn’t share, it came at a most auspicious time in my life, where I found myself, like Dante, “midway through the course of life…alone in a dark wood.”

The Mike Judge film Idiocracy has proved prescient these last five years. The film depicts a dystopian American future in which people have become dumb to the point of barely being able to communicate, civic institutions have collapsed, a tide of garbage threatens to engulf everything, and no one knows how things work anymore, including how to grow crops. The material infrastructure of civilization is collapsing because its mental infrastructure has withered.

The film is aptly titled. When we hear the term “idiot,” we think of aptitude; it denotes a person with a low IQ. But the Greek term from which our word is derived was more about attitude; an idiot was a private person who did not concern himself with public affairs. In this latter sense, one could be a clever idiot. For not only the Greek philosophers but for the civic culture of the time, such a person was both morally and intellectually deficient; he lacked self-knowledge, and did not understand his place in the order of things. He not only failed to fulfill his obligations to the community, but to know that he had any, or that he belonged to one. He did not see that he was a node in a network, not an island unto himself.

The pandemic and the bungled response to it was, among many other things, a true apocalypse in the original sense of the term—an “unveiling”—that revealed the idiocracy behind the curtain of our culture. The isolation into which so many were forced was a function of the failure to see how interconnected we are. In 2016, Rebecca Solnit dubbed it the “ideology of isolation”:

What keeps the ideology of isolation going is going to extremes. If you begin by denying social and ecological systems, then you end in denying the reality of facts, which are after all part of a network of systematic relationships between language, physical reality, and the record, regulated by the rules of evidence, truth, grammar, word meaning, and so forth. You deny the relationship between cause and effect, evidence and conclusion, or rather you imagine both as products on the free market, which one can produce and consume according to one’s preferences. You deregulate meaning.

The ideology of isolation is what unites climate denial, vaccine reticence, and post-truth politics.

But the silver lining is that the pandemic forced us to face isolation itself, in its most carnal, naked form. You are forced to remove yourself from society because of how tightly bound you are to it, because a strange thing that can’t exist apart from human bodies courses through you, because your microbiome is bound to the microbiosphere. If you venture outside, you don’t just see other people, you see the empty space between you and them as a dense reality demanding respect. Like the kingdom of code in which we are virtual citizens, we are, in Sherry Turkle’s formulation, “alone, together.” You are forced to not just know, but feel, that you are part of the conspiracy of life. Plotinus pithily described the spiritual journey as the “flight from the alone to the alone.” From the alone to the all one.

How the Way does things is through storms swirling, pathogens spreading, climates changing, and regimes collapsing. These things are only hard to grasp because we are grasping. If we but follow them, they will ferry us beyond them. A gift cannot be grasped, and a grasp cannot give.

What thoughts and things and spirit and certainty await us in the inner outer darkness?

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 20: Being Different

“Ignorant, ignorant.

Most people are so bright.

I’m the one that’s dull.

Most people are so keen.

I don’t have the answers.

Oh, I’m desolate, at sea,

adrift, without harbor.

Everybody has something to do.

I’m the clumsy one, out of place.

I’m the different one,

for my food

Is the milk of the mother.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Here, LeGuin casts Lao-Tzu less like an ancient, egoless Daoist sage and more like a modern, neurotically self-conscious urban dweller. What gives?

I suspect she aims to help the modern reader see the tortured constellation of her psyche more clearly, embrace it, laugh at it, and thus transfigure it.

The psychic condition toward which this chapter points can perhaps best be described as Imposter Syndrome, a condition so common nowadays that it has become all but existential. Imposter Syndrome is a function of perfectionism and toxic positivity. The social machinery here operates according to a logic of Mutually Assured Projection. We unconsciously project onto others all the qualities we wish to possess, and vice versa, and consciously conspire to project an image of “brightness,” of having “something to do,” of having it all together. We fail to see that everyone is improvising and, as the popular saying goes, everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. What results is an aspirational arms race in which no one can win. As in the film War Games, the only way to win is to quit the game.

Or, perhaps, to realize that it is just a game. If you’re a live player, you live to play, not to win; you treat the game as the real thing, not its end. In this regard, the opponent is not the other players, but yourself. As psychologist Robert Kegan likes to put it, “You either feast on your shadow, or starve on your ego.” The beginning of wisdom, as Socrates would agree, is the recognition of ignorance.  

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 19: Raw Silk and Uncut Wood

“What works reliably is to know the raw silk,

hold the uncut wood.

Need little,

want less.

Forget the rules.

Be untroubled.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Chaos gets a bad rap in the West. It’s the messy room. It’s the sink full of dishes. It’s the formless void from which God has to wrest a cosmos in the opening chapter of Genesis.

And in the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth on which Genesis was likely modeled, it’s Tiamat: the ticked off dragon goddess of sea and winter on a mission to wipe out her fellow deities. Jordan Peterson never tires of drawing on this myth as the origin and essence of the Western dialectic of order and chaos, good and evil, white and black. And while his follow up to 12 Rules for Life, Beyond Meaning, gestures at the upside of chaos, there is an unmistakable preference for order. Not without reason has he become a guru to the alt-right, Trumpers, preppers, the “law and order” crowd, and in general young men intuiting the need to channel their testosterone toward a higher purpose than porn and video games.

Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom.” Pure possibility frightens us, and reasonably so. Raw silk and uncut wood can evoke fear and trembling, so with great dispatch we move to make them in our own image and likeness. We scramble to impose a reassuring form and familiar frame on the raw material rudely jutting into our little window on the world. We make to rule it and, what is hardest, we do so automatically and unconsciously.

But the Daoist understanding of the dance between order and chaos is less black and white. There is no such thing as purely raw material, just as there is no purely raw food. Uncooked meat is not “raw” to a lion. To know raw silk or hold uncut wood is to behold what is before you in such a way that it reveals itself; the subtle forms, the hidden laws, the tiny rules will emerge from the thing like the image in a magic eye painting. You just need dull your focus. This is how to make beauty the rule rather than the exception of your perception.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 18: Second Bests

“In the degradation of the great way

come benevolence and righteousness.

….

The disordered family

Is full of dutiful children and parents.

The disordered society is full of patriots.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Lao Tzu’s direct target here is Confucius, but he’s really just referring to any society bereft of trust. But who could be against benevolence, righteousness, and doing one’s duty? Aren’t these precisely the virtues that create and sustain “law and order”?

Lao-Tzu is not so much casting these virtues as vices as he is skewering what we today would call “virtue signaling.” While it’s generally (often religious) people on the Right braying about progressives doing this on the Left—e.g., posting support for BLM on social media while continuing about their UMC/PMC bourgeoius lives, or sporting Bernie bumper stickers while opposing zoning changes in their tony, gentrified neighborhoods—virtue signaling is precisely what Jesus faulted the Pharisees for.

Virtue signaling—what Jesus called “hypocrisy,” a term derived from the Greek for “actor”—is a function of a lack of trust. If our bodies and hearts and minds are in sync with each other and with our surroundings, we don’t need to use magic words to know we are on the same wavelength. We don’t need flags and symbols and war cries and scapegoats. We just dance.

But once we lose the beat and drift apart, we get scared, and we start dancing to different rhythms, and the rhythms clash, and this noise frightens us, and we yearn for that original harmony. So we have to make up words and rules, and we have to crow about them, and anyone who doesn’t repeat our words and follow our rules is not one of us. And if we don’t repeat the words often and loudly enough, if we don’t follow the rules faithfully enough, we will be cast into the outer darkness.

But for Lao Tzu, the outer darkness is the place to be; or more precisely, being on what Richard Rohr calls the “edge of the inside”—the position of the prophet who plays by the rules of society but knows that they are just a game. The prophet plays the long game of creatively and cleverly bending the rules and expanding the box of who is included and what is permitted. The hypocrite, the virtue signaler, fears the outer darkness because he has not reckoned with his inner darkness.

Beware false prophets, aye, but beware false patriots ever more.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 17: Acting Simply

“True leaders

are hardly known to their followers.

Next after them are the leaders

The people know and admire;

After them, those they fear;

after them, those they despise.

….

When the work’s done right,

With no fuss or boasting,

Ordinary people say,

Oh, we did it.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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The Obama administration’s oft-ridiculed phrase “leading from behind” was meant to describe an approach to foreign policy that departed from neoconservative hardcore unilateralism in favor of a softer touch meant to coax allies into joining our causes and putting skin in the game. But it could just as well have described the army of civil servants who ran the federal government under his watch.

Biologist E.O. Wilson once wrote a famous essay, “The Little Things That Run the World,” where he pointed out that while environmentalists tend to wring their hands over the demise of charismatic megafauna like polar bears and rhinos, it’s actually the billions of itty bitty creatures we barely see—insects and fungi and microbes (and, as we say today, microbiomes)—that form the circulatory system that makes the biosphere (and our bodies) function. In The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis profiles the little people that run the world; not the political appointees who head federal agencies, but the dedicated career people who actually run them, from USDA to Energy to Commerce. The people no one ever hears about, but on whose work and expertise everyone depends.

Trump—the leader who was most feared, most despised, and most known—did more than every previous president to disrupt the smooth operation of the federal government, erode confidence in its competence, and cast doubt on its necessity. He did so because we was not a true leader, but a follower in two senses.

First, Trump read the room correctly—the gathering perfect storm of post-2008 economic malaise, anti-elitist and anti-immigrant sentiment, distrust of experts, and racial backlash against a black president for which Palin and the Tea Party had delivered proof of concept as a powerful political resource ripe for exploitation—and acted accordingly. Demagogues are usually referred to as “popular leaders,” but this is an oxymoron based on an ignorance of political psychology. The demagogue follows the people because he encourages them to follow their own base impulses, and because he is simply following his own hunger for power, fame, riches, or some combination thereof. Plato unforgettably profiles the demagogue in the Republic, noting that he carefully studies the sounds and movements of the inchoate beast of public opinion, and then slavishly imitates and exaggerates them to whip them up into an even greater frenzy. He leads them only in the sense of luring them even deeper into their confusion and crudity.

Second, Trump was following the advice of counselors like Steve Bannon, whose primary mission was the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” or what came to be called, pejoratively, the “deep state.” While the deep state was one of the less outlandish conspiracy theories of the Trump era–in the sense that unlike, say, QAnon or Stop the Steal, there is a factual state of affairs which it misguidedly attempts to describe–the actions taken to weaken it are arguably the most consequential.

Lewis tells the story of Max Stier’s quest to boost public awareness and appreciation of the unsung heroes of the deep state. Lewis writes that if you were to line up the entire American population “by each citizen’s interest in the federal government, and Donald Trump loitered somewhere near one end of it, Max Stier would occupy the other.” Stier adopted an unglamorous role to highlight umglamorous people and unglamorous work. His greatest challenge, Lewis explains, was “explaining the value of this enterprese at the center of a democratic society to people who either took it for granted or imagined it as a pernicious force in their lives over which they had no control.” The administrative state is deep, and that depth is both the source of its operational strength, and the reason the lack of awareness and respect the public have toward it—it’s largely invisible. Like the bugs and bacteria, it all moves silently under the surface of the soil and the skin, keeping things going. A better term than the deep state is what Suzanne Mettler calls the “submerged state.” Stier recently lobbied Congress to reverse the Trump administration’s efforts to increase the ratio of political appointees to career positions in the upper ranks of federal agencies, efforts that are tantamount to deforestation: the more you cut down the trees that have been around a long time that have deep roots in the soil, the more likely the surrounding soil will erode, and the less effectively the ecosystem will function and flourish. And, of course, the more carbon you’ll release into the air.

While the deep state is far from perfect, the alternative is the shallow state. When a Trump administration official finally swung by the Commerce Department to be brief about the organization he would soon by running and was told about NOAA, he replied, “What the fuck is NOAA?”

Now that the country has been through an administration and a pandemic that have made painfully plain how necessary a functional federal government is to keeping us safe, perhaps more people will see the deep state for what it is: not a cabal of corrupt bureacrats on the bankroll of George Soros, but ordinary people maintaining the ark of modern civilization and leading us toward calmer seas.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 16: Returning to the Root

“The ten thousand things arise together;

in their arising is their return.

Now they flower,

and flowering

sink homeward,

returning to the root.

The return to the root

is peace.

Peace: to accept what must be,

To know what endures.

In that knowledge is wisdom.

Without it, ruin, disorder.

….

The body comes to its ending,

But there is nothing to fear.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

It’s customary to juxtapose Western philosophy as heady and complex and Eastern philosophy as embodied and simple. Though this cut does touch truth, the Greek philosopher Epicurus is an exception. His recipe for a good life was simple and straightforward. What came to be known as the “Tetrapharmakos,” the “four part cure,” tells you:

• Don’t fear God
• Don’t worry about death
• What is good is easy to get
• What is terrible is easy to endure

Epicureanism flourished in antiquity but became a minority report in the Western tradition because it was stamped out by the Vatican. A moment’s reflection on the recipe shows why, as Nietzsche quipped, “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink.” Despite the Church’s efforts, the root of Epicureanism proved too resilient, and it re-flowered and effloresced in the Renaissance.

Lao Tzu would have agreed with Epicurus, and this would appear to set him at odds with the Christian tradition. “To those who will not admit morality without a deity to validate it,” Leguin points out in her commentary, such advice “must seem incomprehensible, or illegitimate, or very troubling indeed.” Daoism does not see the need for the cosmos to have a backstop.

But perhaps things are not as they seem. Adam and Eve courted ruin and disorder only when they strayed from their roots—as creatures of the earth—and reached for the heavens, wanting to be like God. Mistakenly convinced that they didn’t already have it good enough and that it was terrible to endure their condition without escaping it, they tried to change things. They feared abiding in the Dao. They did not accept what must be.

Exiled from the garden, deracinated, they long to return to the tree whose plenty they didn’t notice: the Tree of Life. For the Daoist, every tree is the tree of life. When the Hebrews are told to build of the ark of the covenant to hold the tabernacle after they escape from Egypt, they have to wander in the wilderness for forty years lugging it around until they reach the Promised Land. Why?

Because it reminds them that God is always with them—even in the desert, where flowers can’t take root.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 15: People of Power

“Once upon a time

people who knew the Way

were subtle, spiritual, mysterious, penetrating,

unfathomable.

….

“Who can by stillness, little by little

make what is troubled grow clear?

Who can by movement, little by little

Make what is still grow quick?

To follow the way

Is not to need fulfillment.

Unfulfilled, one may live on

Needing no renewal.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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There are about three types in people. What separates them is their attitude toward time.

The first kind romanticizes hunter-gatherers.

The second kind romanticizes the Middle Ages.

The third kind dreams about the future.

Each projects the Way outside of the present; they just project along different timelines and tell different stories about how we fell off the beam and how to get back on it.

The first kind—the Progressives—gnash their teeth over capitalism, consumerism, climate change, the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution, and pretty much the entirety of Western civilization. You know them: they shop at Whole Foods, feel ambivalent and guilty about shopping at Whole Foods because it’s corporate and bougie and owned by Amazon, buy all their stuff from Amazon and feel said ambivalence and guilt about same, do yoga, virtue signal Wokeness, strive for Wellness, deny the progress that is obvious to everyone else, and document the minutiae of their lives on Instagram as a hedge against existential despair.

The second kind—the Traditionalists—gnash their teeth over abortion, the sexual revolution, the erosion of family values, the collapse of community, what Pope Benedict XVI called the “dictatorship of relativism,” Hollywood, porn, and Critical Race Theory. You know them: they take pride in having large families with Tradwives, they champion “religious liberty,” they’re concerned about attacks on free speech, they’re convinced Christianity and Western Civilization is under assault, they’re tickled by the Benedict Option but grudgingly relish the comforts of modern suburban living, and they probably voted for Trump.

The third kind—the Modernists—gnash their teeth over taxes, regulations, government bureaucracy, friction, inefficiency, and the political extremists on “both sides.” They believe that hard work, science, technological innovation, free markets, and economic growth have improved and will continue to improve the material standard of living and that the material standard of living is the standard of living. In the future we will cure disease and death, and the lucky among us will live on a sea-steading libertarian platform paradise, a New Zealand sheep farm, Mars, or plugged into the Matrix.

The careful reader will have noticed, and perhaps thought it a typo, that above I wrote types “in” people, not types “of” people. We are not the stories that ravel our minds. What all three of these types share is the projection of paradise outside the present. They imagine fulfillment was or will be found, or at least easier to find, in Star Wars or Star Trek—a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, or a distant technological utopia—in a quiet place or outer space. Game the scenarios out, and what you find is that the Progressives want to eliminate self-consciousness and evolutionarily regress to pre-human primates; the Traditionalists want to eliminate the modernity that offers them the freedom to practice their religion unmolested; the Modernists want to escape the human condition and ascend to the Cloud. What they share is the idea that if we move the furniture of the world around thus and so, we will find peace.

The problem is that the “once upon a time” in this chapter is allegorical.

Once upon a time you knew the Way, but at some point you started telling yourself a story, and your type took hold. But you can, by stillness and by movement, wriggle out of your type, and find clarity and foster growth. In Buddhist terms, samsara—the cycle of suffering, death, and rebirth—is not a set of historical conditions; it’s a story spinning in your head. Nirvana is not located in a lost golden age or a kingdom to come. As Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is “within you” and “at hand.” And as Emerson wrote, “Every age is a good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 14: Celebrating Mystery

“Look at it: nothing to see.

Call it colorless.

Listen to it: nothing to hear.

Call it soundless.

Reach for it: nothing to hold.

Call it intangible.

Triply undifferentiated,

It merges into oneness,

Not bright above,

Not dark below.

….

Call it unthinkable thought.

Face it: no face.

Follow it: no end.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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One of the many challenges the phenomenon we refer to as climate change presents is what to call it. “Global warming” masks many of its aspects, and conjures visions of balmy Caribbean beaches in our future. “Climate change” is vague and value-neutral. Even “climate disruption” doesn’t quite do the trick, since among business and tech people—i.e., the most powerful actors in the system—disruption is a good thing that yields wealth and innovation. Beyond this, all of these labels frame the climate problem as an environmental issue: they compartmentalize and cordon it off from politics, economics, and society at large. This language is a function of our modern dissociation of nature and culture. We imagine the climate, and nature is general, as something “out there” or “up there,” rather than something that not only surrounds and supports society, but suffuses it. As Vaclav Smil puts it, there is no such thing as the economy, there are only energy conversions.

But another reason we struggle to name the climate problem is that it is what theorist Tim Morton calls a “hyperobject.” Or to use Whitehead’s category, climate change lacks “simple location” (well, according to Whitehead’s process philosophy, everything lacks simple location, an ontological insight confirmed by quantum mechanics, and one that underwrote Fritjof Capra’s attempt to integrate the new physics with Eastern philosophies in the Tao of Physics). A hyperobject is something so large, so complex, and so distributed throughout time and space that when pressed to explain it, the mind balks. As Augustine confessed in his analysis of time, “If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one who should ask me, plainly I do not know.”

This paradox of knowing and not knowing is eerily similar to the state of anxiety; while fear has reference to a distinct object, anxiety is “about nothing”—it is more a cypher for the maw of the abyss of the future, for the singularity of the black hole, for Kali. And that drives us slightly mad: hence the apt title of Amitav Ghosh’s book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. If you follow this line of thought, climate change begins to resemble what existentialists like Martin Heidegger referred to as being itself; being as opposed to beings. When we begin to see climate not as merely or mainly as environmental, but as existential—and collectively existential—then our fumbling has laid hold of a genuine thread. And rather than flee that anxiety—crank up the AC, put the pedal to the metal, trust that economic growth and technological innovation will take care of it–we interrogate it, listen to it, and trust that it has something vital to tell us.

Morton—and the kind of environmental pessimist he stands in for—underestimates our abilities to grasp the climate problem. If we rely on thought alone, yes, due to cognitive biases and the propaganda of the fossil-fuel industrial complex, the deck is stacked against us. But in the face of the weakness of the logos, we can turn to the power of the mythos—of myth, story, image, and narrative. Bruno Latour suggests that we already have all we need—not so much a new religion, but an old goddess: Gaia. In Facing Gaia, Latour frames the climate problem not as exclusively environmental or even economic, but as mythopoetic and political. The saving story is sewn into the first fabrics of Western civilization. Coupled with scientist James Locklock’s Gaia hypothesis, which indicates that the thin, globe-spanning sphere that supports all life is a single, interdependent system, Gaia can plausibly serve as the “image of no image.” As the positive-sum, post-World War II, worldcentric, neoliberal order buckles, and a return to the zero-sum, 19^th century, ethnocentric, nationalistic order looms, a planet-centric Gaiapolitik may be the way through. We have all the threads we need.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to properly naming the climate problem is seeing it as a problem in the first place. The most popular framing of climate is the aesthetics of apocalypse, but ironically, this doesn’t take the idea of apocalypse seriously enough. The term literally means un “unveiling” or “uncovering.” Seen this way, an apocalypse is not just an end, but a new beginning and, in that way, progress. In the fullness of time, we may come to see climate change not as a problem, but as a solution to arguably the greatest civilizational problem: how to build a global society without destroying ourselves. Nothing unites people like a common threat. For all of human history, that threat has been another person, another tribe, another country, another religion. The peril and promise of climate is that we have seen the enemy, and it is us. Nothing in human history has had the potential to unite all peoples and nations around a common goal, to catalyze planetary awareness at scale. If we frame the goal less in negative terms—avoiding disaster—and more in positive terms—building a new civilization—and see climate less as a burden and more as a blessing, we are more likely to solve it.

The chapter concludes:

“Holding fast to the old Way,

we can live in the present.

Mindful of the ancient beginnings,

we hold the thread of the Tao.”

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”